Grow your business faster with machine learning: Part I

Marketers are increasingly turning to Google’s machine learning to meet consumer expectations and grow their business, faster. To learn more, read the first post in our three-part blog series on machine learning.Read the post.

If you're interested in creating a stronger online brand presence or drawing a high volume of traffic to your site, YouTube can help you accomplish both by giving you access to the world's largest online video-streaming and -sharing community. YouTube can further enhance your current online advertising campaigns with millions of ad impressions and video ad streaming opportunities so that you can create the high-profile online presence that your website needs.

There are now a number of ways in which you can raise your profile as an advertiser using YouTube. During a live course on the Adwords Online Classroom (UK), you'll learn about the different methods of targeting YouTube and how to make the most out of any existing presence you may already have on YouTube.

This live course will be presented by a YouTube Specialist and is appropriate for all advertisers interested in growing their profile on YouTube. It will take place on Wednesday, February 2, 2011, from 3 pm to 4 pm GMT (7 am to 8 am PST).

What do you want to see when you first log into your account? Many advertisers have told us that they want a quick snapshot of account performance and a summary of any important problems to address. However, the details vary quite a bit: Some advertisers want to quickly identify any keywords with bids below their first page bid estimates. Others might want to focus on campaign-level metrics before diving into keyword stats or use a graph to quickly identify any major fluctuations in performance. In short, customization is key!

With this in mind, we’ve recently introduced a new version of the AdWords Home tab. Just like before, the page features a summary of account alerts and a graph of account performance, but it allows for more extensive customization to help you monitor the parts of your account that matter to you.

The modules on the Home tab are based on saved filters created on your Campaigns tab. This provides you with the flexibility to define exactly which metrics and sections of your account are important to review right when you log in. To get you started, we’ve added some default filters to populate your Home tab, but you can feel free to remove those and customize as much as you’d like! These same modules will appear on AdWords for Mobile, helping you keep tabs on your account while you’re on the go.

Visit our Help Center to learn more about these changes and how to make the most out of your Home tab. You can access it now by clicking “New version” on your existing Account Snapshot page (check back soon if you don’t see it right away), and let us know what you think!

In 2010, we introduced a new Google AdWords Certification Program to equip you and your companies with more up-to-date, comprehensive, strategy-focused training and certification on the latest tools and best practices for managing AdWords accounts. Along with the revised certification program, we launched Google Partner Search, an opt-in, online, searchable directory that helps advertisers identify Certified Partners to help them manage their AdWords accounts.

Over the last few months, you’ve shared feedback with us that you’d like features that make it easier to associate your individual certification with a company and more intuitive to add users to your company profile. We’re pleased to share that we’ve now released features to address each of these points of feedback.

Request to link your individual qualification to a companyHistorically, to join a company in the Google Certification Program, you would need to be invited by an Administrator on your company’s account, making it difficult to join if you didn't know the Administrator. To fix this challenge, we now offer a feature enabling you to search for your company and request to join yourself. If you would like to contribute your individual qualification to a company account, you may now do so by clicking on the “My Company” link and searching for the company you wish to join. Be sure to type in at least one complete word that matches the company’s name.

Companies -- easily manage Professionals and AdministratorsWe’ve made it more intuitive for your company to manage the Professionals and Administrators within the Company account, as well as to review requests from users requesting to join the company, with the updated Account Access page.

On the “Users” tab, account administrators can change a user’s status to either Administrator or Professional, as well as revoke access:

The “Incoming requests” tab allows account administrators to see all requests to join from individuals and either accept or reject them. Finally, the “Invitations sent” tab can be used to directly send invitations to qualified individuals.

Add or update Google Accounts associated with your profileWe know that qualified individuals may change companies or use multiple email addresses throughout the day. We’ve therefore made it possible for you to add multiple Google Accounts to your account, as well as to change the primary email address at which you receive communication for the Google Certification Program.

This Wednesday, January 26th, we’ll be hosting a live online course about Ecommerce in Google Analytics as part of the AdWords Online Classroom (UK).

During the course, we’ll discuss how to set up Ecommerce tracking in your Analytics account and enable it for your reports. We’ll also discuss implementation techniques such as tracking third-party shopping carts and detail the best reports to use for in-depth analysis of your AdWords activity. This should help you assess your AdWords return on investment and give you more insight into how your advertising is performing in terms of online transactions and revenue generated on your site.

The course will be presented by Analytics specialists and is most suited to advertisers with websites that include the functionality to purchase goods or services. It will take place on Wednesday, January 26th from 3 pm to 4 pm GMT (7 am to 8 am PST) and will include time for Q&A.

Ever wonder how customers interact with your ads before they click through to your website? How often do they open a product extension plusbox or get directions to your store directly from the ad? For video and display ads, how long are they sticking around, to watch your video or interact with your ad’s content?

Wonder no more! Today, we’re launching a new report in AdWords to help you measure interactions that take place before a click-through for video ads, display ads built with the Display Ad Builder, product extensions and location extensions. If you’re not yet using these ad products, now is a great time to give them a try given the expanded reporting now available.

To access the new report, select the “Free clicks” view within the Dimensions tab of your AdWords account. If you don't see the Dimensions tab, you can enable it by clicking the arrow button next to your existing tabs above your performance table.

Here, you’ll find stats on actions your customers take without having to click through to your website. To distinguish them from clicks that you pay for, we’ve labeled them “Free clicks” and kept them separate from the paid clicks listed in other tabs.

Campaigns or ad groups with a high number of free clicks may mean that your ads are performing better than they appear to be elsewhere in your account. A high free click rate may indicate ads that your customers find useful without needing to visit your website. For example, getting directions to your store (via a location extension ad) may be all your customer needs to instigate an in-store purchase. Conversely, video ads that have low play rates may indicate a creative change that needs to take place to keep customers engaged.

Knowing how customers interact with your ads will help give insight into how they research and buy online and what content captures their attention and prompts action. Ads are likely to continue to be more and more interactive, so take advantage of this new report to create ads that are more engaging and useful, all with the ultimate goal of increasing sales for your business.

The Ad Preview Tool is a handy way to check how your ads appear on Google without accumulating additional impressions or clicks. By setting a specific location for your preview, you can see how your ads will look to a user in New York even if you’re located in San Francisco.

We’ve recently given the Preview Tool a face-lift and introduced some helpful new features. If you’re signed into your account while previewing your ads, you’ll now see integrated keyword diagnosis results. In this example below, we’ve entered our keyword red roses to see if it’s triggering ads in New York:

In addition to displaying the ads for that search, the Preview Tool now specifically confirms whether your ad is showing and links to the relevant campaign and ad group. If your ad isn’t showing, the Preview Tool will tell you why, helping you understand if you need to adjust your bids, location targeting, daily budget, or optimize your account.

Using the new Device setting, you can also view and diagnose your ads for high-end mobile devices. You can even choose the specific device and carrier you’re interested in, so you can check ad visibility on multiple devices without borrowing all of your friends’ phones!

This feature is especially relevant if you're using location extensions to target your mobile ad campaign to an area other than your physical location. By entering latitude and longitude information in the Ad Preview Tool, you can quickly confirm that your ads are correctly displaying your business address to mobile users within a specific location. You can also determine whether a hyperlocal distance marker, which lets users know exactly how far away they are from your business, is visible for your ads.

You can explore these new features by finding the Ad Preview Tool under the Reporting and Tools tab in your AdWords account or by navigating directly to www.google.com/adpreview.

This Wednesday, January 19, we'll be hosting a live online course on Remarketing in the AdWords Online Classroom (UK). This free, hour-long, interactive presentation will be delivered by an Online Media Specialist and will take place at 3pm GMT (7am PST). There will also be time for Q&A.

Remarketing is a simple way to connect with your website visitors. After driving traffic to your site with search ads, you can then remarket to those people who reach your site by showing them tailored ads as they browse through sites on the Google Display Network.

During this session we'll take you through the benefits of using remarketing and how to set it up in your account. If you advertise with AdWords and are interested in the Google Display Network then we encourage you to attend.

On Saturday, January 15, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PST due to our regularly scheduled system maintenance. While you won't be able to log into your account during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual.

AdWords system maintenance typically occurs on the second Saturday of each month during the above times. We'll continue to update you here as we always have, but you may want to take note of our intended dates and times to help you plan for any scheduled downtimes further down the road.

As you may already know, contextual targeting helps you reach potential customers as they read webpages related to your products or services. Now, with this tool, you can create contextually-targeted campaigns more easily and quickly, while generating more clicks and conversions for your campaigns.

What does the Contextual Targeting Tool do?This tool automatically builds keyword lists that can be used to show your ads on relevant webpages in the Google Display Network. Tightly-themed keyword lists are the basis of effective contextual targeting, and with the Contextual Targeting Tool, you no longer have to build them manually. In minutes, you can build dozens, even hundreds, of keyword lists, scaling your campaign performance while ensuring accurate targeting for your ads. This means you can get more clicks and conversions for your campaigns and you can do it more quickly.How do I use it?Let’s say you sell soccer equipment and gear. Normally, you'd have to build out separate ad groups for each of your product lines, like soccer gear, soccer balls, soccer cleats, etc. With the Contextual Targeting Tool, simply type each product category into the search box, and the tool will automatically generate tightly-themed keyword lists for you. For example, when you enter soccer gear into the tool, you get more specific ad groups, such as youth soccer gear, discount soccer gear, soccer uniforms, soccer bags, etc.

These new ad groups can help you get additional traffic and sales, as you may not think of creating them when manually building out your campaigns. Along with the new ad groups, the tool provides suggested bids and predicted placements to give you an idea of the types of sites in the Display Network where your ads can appear.

The Contextual Targeting Tool has been available to advertisers using AdWords Editor. This week, all advertisers will be able to access it from the Opportunities tab in their AdWords account. You'll still need AdWords Editor to implement the ad groups in your account for now (download AdWords Editor). However, this requirement will be lifted and you’ll be able to implement new ad groups directly from your AdWords account in the coming months.

You can learn more about using the Contextual Targeting Tool by watching this video. We hope this tool will help you more easily and efficiently reach your goals with your Display Network campaigns.

Over a year ago, we launched Ad Sitelinks on Google.com as way to help you enhance your top-performing ads with additional relevant information. The results for Ad Sitelinks have been stunning, with the two-line format increasing clickthrough rates, on average, by over 30%.

We’ve also been impressed by your creativity. Since we launched Ad Sitelinks, we’ve seen you employ many different strategies when deciding which links to use in your ads. A willingness to test and experiment with different links has helped some advertisers, like Nationwide Insurance, get results that blow past the network average.

To help you get the most from Ad Sitelinks, we’re launching a serving enhancement designed to help improve your overall performance. In the past, we simply used the order in which you entered your Sitelinks to rank which ones to serve. For example, while you could enter up to ten Sitelinks for a campaign, we primarily used the top four for any ad in the campaign (as long as they met our policy guidelines).

We received requests from many of you to improve this logic by automatically determining which Sitelinks to show based on historical performance. We’re happy to say that, starting today, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Now, we’ll be using the historical performance of your Sitelinks to determine which ones to serve.

With this new serving enhancement, AdWords will automatically rotate your Sitelinks and show the ones with the best clickthrough rates more frequently. We’ll do this optimization at the ad group level, which means that although you’ll continue to set Ad Sitelinks at the campaign level, we’ll optimize which Sitelinks to show based on their performance for each ad group.

To make sure that you’re getting the most from Ad Sitelinks, check for the following:

Make sure that you have more than four Sitelinks entered so that we have options to rotate and optimize.

Include several shorter Sitelinks in your list, since our one-line Sitelinks format has a lower overall character limit than the two-line format.

Continue to rank your Sitelinks in priority order. We’ll continue to use your rank order as a factor, in addition to historical performance, when determining which Sitelinks to show with your ad.

To learn how to get started with Ad Sitelinks, visit this link in the AdWords Help Center.

As AdWords users, you know how effective AdWords can be in driving traffic to your website and how it can turn curious visitors into regular customers. But since not every visit leads to a sale, wouldn’t it be great to have other ways of making money from those visits?

Google AdSense is a free program that helps you earn revenue by displaying relevant ads on your site. We give you a piece of code to put on your site, you choose where to place ads, and you earn revenue when visitors click on them. (To learn more about Google AdSense, watch this video.)

DesignerApparel.com is an AdWords and AdSense client that has had great success using these two products together. DesignerApparel.com offers premium designer clothes at affordable prices. They implemented AdSense for Content and AdSense for Search and specifically targeted certain pages within their site. DesignerApparel.com had complete control over what types of ads appeared.

“We have come to think of AdSense revenue as a partial but instant rebate on our AdWords investment,” said Dominic Ang, President of MyPerfectSale.com, the owner of DesignerApparel.com. “While we were initially concerned about potential cannibalization, we have found out that using certain spots for AdSense such as the end of a page or in exit pages can drive significant additional revenue with no loss in our core e-commerce revenue."

When you’re out and about, is your phone your go-to computer? If you find yourself doing mobile searches for information, directions, or even real-time price comparisons, you’re not alone--mobile search is growing fast. Over the past two years, Google's mobile searches have grown by more than five times. Furthermore, in the third quarter of 2010, Google mobile searches jumped 130% year over year.

Given the growth of mobile search, it’s no surprise that more and more of you are looking to capitalize on the mobile advertising opportunity. If you’re already a mobile advertiser or if you’re looking to make your jump onto the small screen, your job has just gotten easier.

Mobile Statistics in the Keyword Tool

The Keyword Tool now helps you build a better keyword list to target mobile users. Under "Advanced options," you can now search for keywords for devices with mobile WAP browsers, mobile devices with full Internet browsers (think iPhone and Android phones), or all mobile devices (sum of devices with WAP browsers and devices with Internet browsers).

When you do a keyword search, the statistics you see for Competition, Global and Local Monthly Searches, and Local Search Trends are all specific to the device or devices that you’ve selected.

On Wednesday, January 12th, we’re hosting a free live online course in the AdWords Online Classroom (UK) about getting the most for your AdWords budget through basic optimisation and targeting.

In this live course, we’ll cover ways to manage your budget through effective targeting and basic optimisation. We’ll first look at how you can improve targeting by adjusting location and network settings. This will be followed by a discussion of how good account structure, multiple ad variations, and effective keywords will help you get the most for your money.

This hour-long interactive course will be presented by AdWords Specialists at 3:00 pm GMT (7:00 am PST) on Wednesday, January 12th. At the end of the session, there will be time for Q&A.

In any given month, we experiment with hundreds of subtle variations of the Google search results page, testing everything from font sizes and colors to layouts and spacing, as well as dozens of other variables. Recently, we found that by standardizing the look of the URLs on the page, we were able to improve many of our user metrics, including ad clickthrough rates.

As a result, we've decided to update the appearance of the display URLs of all ads that appear on search results pages in the next week or so. Following the change, the domain portion of your display URL will always be shown in lowercase letters. For example, if your display URL is Subdomain.Example.com/Subdirectory, it will appear as subdomain.example.com/Subdirectory.

There’s no need for you to make any edits to your ads. All uppercase letters in your display URL domain will automatically be changed to lowercase when your ad is served.

As you've probably figured out by now, we believe that regular website testing is the best way to ensure an optimal user experience, and we encourage you to test variations of your own website. Learn how you can start testing with our Website Optimizer tool.

Negative keywords are a great way to refine your keyword lists and filter out unwanted impressions for your campaigns. By excluding specific terms that aren’t relevant to the services you offer, you can improve the relevance of your ads and make your campaigns more effective.

In addition to filtering out specific terms in the context of a single ad group or campaign, many advertisers maintain a set of core negative keywords across several campaigns. Examples of these terms might be free or trial -- search terms that aren’t promising if you’re looking to sell products on your website. Negative keywords like these don’t require granular management on the campaign level, and we’ve heard from many of you that you’d like a more scalable way to manage these broadly-applicable sets of terms.

Now, we’re happy to introduce a new way to manage negative keywords across multiple campaigns: negative keyword lists. With these lists, you’ll be able to manage a group of negative keywords in your account’s Control Panel and Library and associate them with multiple campaigns.

For example, say you have a set of negative keywords you always add to any campaign running on the Search Network. Previously, you’d need to copy that set to every new search campaign you created in your account. Now, with shared lists, you can simply create a single negative keyword list and associate it with each search campaign. If there’s a new negative keyword you’d like to add to all of those campaigns, just add it to your list and it will automatically update across each campaign. Similarly, if you create a new campaign, you can add your negative keyword list to exclude all of the necessary terms with just a few clicks.

Visit our Help Center to learn more about how to get started with negative keyword lists.